Breakthrough in Screenings for Explosives and Narcotics | Anti-democratic Warning Signs Are Blinking in Current Polling | The Campus-Left Occupation That Broke Higher Education, and more

Integration of risk and intelligence-based threat information will further enhance security measures, making the passenger experience more enjoyable and comforting, with built-in conveniences and threat mitigation.
Amidst these advancements, the need for a precision trace detection system with enhanced performance of the currently fielded Ion Mobility Spectrometry (IMS) based trace detection systems has become increasingly apparent. Minimizing the costs and inconveniences associated with false alarms is crucial, highlighting the importance of deploying accurate and efficient security measures. As we navigate the evolving security landscape, ensuring the effectiveness of detection systems remains paramount in safeguarding travelers and maintaining the integrity of airports and other points of entry.

Anti-democratic Warning Signs Are Blinking in Current Polling  (Philip Bump, Washington Post)
If Donald Trump loses the election this November, why would he not once again try to subvert that loss?
This is not a baseless question, certainly. Both Trump’s critics and his supporters agree that Trump tried to prevent Joe Biden from taking office; they just disagree on the validity of that effort. Most Republicans — 62 percent in a December Washington Post-University of Maryland poll — believe there is solid evidence that the 2020 election was tainted by fraud, which is false. This belief undergirds the idea that Trump’s post-2020-election efforts were rooted in his fighting against an illegal effort to influence the presidency rather than being such an illegal effort.
That view still holds. The Pew Research Center published data Wednesday showing that about half of Republicans (and independents who lean Republican) think Trump did nothing wrong in trying to overturn his 2020 loss, with a fifth indicating they were “not sure” if he did anything wrong. That’s more than two-thirds of the party, claiming innocence or uncertainty. Americans overall (and Democrats/Democratic leaners overwhelmingly) think that Trump did something wrong or broke the law.
The situation in 2024 is different from 2020 in that Trump is no longer president. That means that some of the tactics he deployed then might not be possible, such as trying to get his vice president to undercut the electors being counted by Congress. But many others still are, from pressuring state and local officials to introducing alternate slates of electors. Such efforts would be trickier, given the backlash to them over the past several years, including this week. But there is nothing preventing Trump from once again alleging impropriety or illegality in an effort to undermine any potential loss.

Parents Outraged By Law to Let Tennessee Teachers Carry Guns  (Harriet Alexander, The Times)
A new law in Tennessee allowing teachers to be armed in schools is “dangerous” and risks turning staff into police officers, families of school shooting victims and educational experts have warned.
The concealed-carry law was passed on Wednesday, a year after a shooting at the Covenant School in Nashville in March 2023, when three students and three members of staff were killed.
Parents of pupils at the school were among the harshest critics of the bill. On Monday one mother presented politicians with a letter signed by more than 5,300 people demanding that it be blocked.

The Campus-Left Occupation That Broke Higher Education  (George Packer, The Atlantic)
A long, intricate, but essentially unbroken line connects that rejection of the liberal university in 1968 to the orthodoxy on elite campuses today. The students of the ’68 revolt became professors—the German activist Rudi Dutschke called this strategy the “long march through the institutions”—bringing their revisionist thinking back to the universities they’d tried to upend. One leader of the Columbia takeover returned to chair the School of the Arts film program. “The ideas of one generation become the instincts of the next,” D. H. Lawrence wrote. Ideas born in the ’60s, subsequently refined and complicated by critical theory, postcolonial studies, and identity politics, are now so pervasive and unquestioned that they’ve become the instincts of students who are occupying their campuses today. Group identity assigns your place in a hierarchy of oppression. Between oppressor and oppressed, no room exists for complexity or ambiguity. Universal values such as free speech and individual equality only privilege the powerful. Words are violence. There’s nothing to debate.
Elite universities are caught in a trap of their own making, one that has been a long time coming. They’ve trained pro-Palestinian students to believe that, on the oppressor-oppressed axis, Jews are white and therefore dominant, not “marginalized,” while Israel is a settler-colonialist state and therefore illegitimate. They’ve trained pro-Israel students to believe that unwelcome and even offensive speech makes them so unsafe that they should stay away from campus. What the universities haven’t done is train their students to talk with one another.